Category Archives: Writing to God

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Why God is the Opposite of Boobs

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I got your interest with that title, didn’t I? It’s true though. And it’s not because I’m trying to gender God or something. Maybe God is a woman and then She would be opposite of Her boobs. That’s all I’m saying.

When we are little (like before-we-can-move-by-ourselves little), we have very little concept of the world. And it is theorized that new-borns believe that the entire world is their mothers’ breasts. That’s all there is to life. Nothing else matters or is important. They, supposedly, are consumed by their little newborn perception of that breast. And that’s all that is going on.

Well, then fast-forward a decade or two, and life seems really really complicated. We deal with careers, school, mortgages, children, spouses, significant others, aging families, funerals, marriages, births, birthdays, war, taxes, depressions, disease, and all the other stuff we think is important. And we think we have grown vastly superior to the baby who cannot comprehend anything other than her mother’s breast.

But the truth is that we still haven’t reached a sophisticated truth. Sure, life isn’t all about boobs. It’s good we learned that. (Maybe some people are still trying to get over that part.) But it’s silly that we think that life is all about all of the various things we surround ourselves with now. Why should ten, twenty, thirty years make all that much different.

It’s funny because we often include God in this list of stuff that life is about. But we would be much closer to understanding what God’s power was if we said something like God is life. We used to believe that boobs were life. That was wrong. God is life probably isn’t all that wrong. God’s kinda the opposite of boobs.

There’s a scene in the movie V for Vendetta when one of the characters is reading a letter from one of the other characters, and the letter-writer says that her grandmother used to tell her that “God was in the rain.” I try to remind myself of that every time I find myself uptown without an umbrella.

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Justin Timberlake is the Eye to My Little Toe

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Apostle Paul used to be one of my least favorite writers in the Bible. I think I was kinda using him as a scapegoat. I could just kind of pawn all of the stuff that I didn’t like about the Bible off on him. That wasn’t very fair of me. Paul didn’t have it all that well. He was kinda being attacked wherever he went, and he had multiple parties trying to kill him. He was imprisoned a seemingly infinite number of times, and he lived most of his life alone with very few companions. But through all of that, the man is still one of the most loving and gracious writers that has ever lived.

I am finally starting to build an appreciation for this incredible man. It’s through no action of my own. A lot of people have been graciously walking me through it. But I was with a group the other day and we were talking about this passage Paul wrote, Romans 12:3-21. I don’t know if you are religious or whatever or how you feel about Jesus or whatever. It doesn’t really matter. Romans 12:3-21 is still just amazingly good. It would take me like centuries to talk about the whole thing, but I do want to talk about 3-8. So that’s what we are going to do.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

This is one of the most comforting passages I have ever read. Paul is telling us that we don’t have to do everything. We just have to do the stuff we are good at doing and then do it really well. I often get it into my head that I need to do everything. When I see people doing things that I can’t do and doing them really well, I get jealous. For instance, I want to be a performer sometimes. I fantasize about dancing, playing music, or acting in front of thousands of people. I really really really want to be Justin Timberlake.

The truth is, though, that I’ve not been blessed with the performance gifts. But what I can do is talk about complicated things in a way that a lot of people can understand and jive with. (Although, JT can probably do that as well. At least, he makes people jive.) While that may not be as glamorous as bringing sexy back, Paul says it is just as important.

Paul compares the Church to a human body. None of us is all of the body, but we are all a part of it. Just because the eyes get to see the world doesn’t mean that the little toe is any less important. Do you think the little toe ever gets jealous of the eyes?

What do you bring to the table? Tell me what you think. Would you like to see more posts where I talk about Apostle Paul and Justin Timberlake?

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Impressive Revelations

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I used to be the kind of person who had a lot of ideas about the world. I liked to take people to book stores because I thought that if they could see how smart and original I was among all of the book titles, they would most definitely like me. When I was still in high school, this worked out alright. I thought the “discoveries” I was making about the world were truths. I thought that I was moving to some better, more noble end.

Then, I started to be wrong. It started out with small things. Like someone would ask me if judgment was spelled like judge-ment and I would say of course so. Because that just makes sense. Or someone would ask for a book recommendation, and I would give them my favorite book, and they wouldn’t like it. And all of this seemed really strange and unforeseeable.

Then I started to be wrong about bigger things. I would misjudge other people’s emotions. I found myself regularly overhauling my philosophical ideologies. If you ask some of my closest friends, my most used phrase is “I realized” or “I had the realization that.” I constantly think that I am having revelations. And maybe I am, but chances are I’m not “right” about them, if they are happening so frequently that it takes me more time to tie my shoelaces than it does to decide I’m a “new person.”

I thought that all of this was really unique to me. And then I started learning about Alfred Adler in my psychology class. Adler was really into impressionist art. He thought it told a lot about the world. In class, our professor showed us a picture of an impressionist painting, and he asked us what it would look like if we had our noses pressed up against it. All it would have been is seemingly random brushstrokes of color. And then he asked us what it looked like from where we were sitting. We told him it looked like a stream in the woods, but that’s about all we could make out. Everything else was blurred and beautiful.

"Soleil Levant" - Claude Monet

And I started thinking that God must think we are really funny. Some of us spend our whole lives with our noses stuck to His painting, sure that we know exactly what that random brushstroke means until we are bumped a little and we have to figure out a new random brushstroke. And then some of us think that we are better than those other museum patrons, thinking that we are seeing the full picture. But even those people aren’t able to say more than if the painting generally resembles a stream or mountain or pond.

I think we can see whatever we want in that painting so we should make sure it’s beautiful.

What do you see?